Peer-To-Peer Law. Distribution as a Design Principle for Law

Melanie proposes to apply peer-to-peer to the law to transform it. Challenging liberal legalism design grounded in individualism requires to integrate peer-to-peer as a design principle for the law, towards the recognition of collectives as subjects of rights and duties, and the distribution of the law itself. Elinor Ostrom’s bundle of rights opened a new positive space to think common or shared property.

Commoners have been developing legal hacks to organize collective property with FLOSS and copyleft licenses adopted by commons-based peer production platforms.

Following the Roman law fragmentation of property rights, providers have the right and the duty to apply a licence to their creation to give the fructus right to edit to contributors and the usus right to access to the public, while preventing private appropriation or abusus of rights through the copyleft clause.

Melanie suggests to extend the legal hack which has been operated to copyright to other rights or legal concepts such as liability or legal person, in order to define rights and duties directly for collectives, instead of granting rights on the collective object to individuals.

The paper has been published as Media@LSE Electronic Working Paper Series WP#31, November 2014. Read it here, and check out Melanie’s presentation below. Video of the presentation will be available soon